


the raising of him

by acroamatica



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canon-adjacent, Gen, Pre-Canon, hux's mother has her own child army but rules with love and biscuits, operation: hux's birthmother is a badass, operation: someone love these poor kids, plot elements from aftermath: life debt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 14:11:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7466388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acroamatica/pseuds/acroamatica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the siege breaks and Arkanis falls, one woman sees a way to balance her debts out, and tries to make up for what she has lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the raising of him

**Author's Note:**

> well i guess this is how we get me to write kidfic.
> 
> expanded from the [earlier tumblr post](http://acroamatica.tumblr.com/post/147277966389/huh-what-if-when-arkanis-is-taken-its-a). 
> 
> for kat, eridani, and gen, who made me think this was a good idea.

When Arkanis is taken, it’s a couple of weeks before the dust settles. There are a lot of arrests, a lot of people vanishing here and there, but more than expected defect to the side of the rebels.  


One afternoon there is a woman in her early thirties who presents herself at the makeshift headquarters.  


“Please,” she says. “I have no love for the Empire. I would see them burn. But in the the meantime I must eat, and the house where I worked is shut, and…” Her hands shake, but she masters herself. “I am a more than competent cook and your troops must eat. Please. Let me work.”  


They have an interrogator droid check her over, of course. But she speaks the truth. She worked for the Commandant, and the hate she holds in her heart is powerful enough to convince anyone. They allow her into the kitchens.  


Soon enough they notice that all the children have found her, and despite the fact that she has no child of her own, she sings to them, slips them extra snacks, and they follow her around like a tiny troop.  


In a year or so there is not a child on the base that does not love her and would not do her bidding gladly and efficiently.  


And when the rumours become truth, that the Princess is visiting, they want a local nursemaid for the baby she has just had. He is fussy, hard to soothe, and so they come to the kitchen woman with the children at her skirts, and she says she will.  


She puts on her cleanest clothes and a fresh cloth over her hair, and curtseys as deeply as she can to the Princess, who is young and beautiful and looks… completely exhausted.  


“Let me take him, Your Highness,” she says. And the Princess hands her the swaddled, squalling bundle.  


She presses the baby to her, strokes the tufts of dark hair. “Sweet little one,” she says to the wailing baby. “Darling. It’s all right. It’s all right now.” And he hiccups, and then burps - and then yawns.  


“He’s precious,” she says to the Princess, who rather looks like she might cry too. “What is his name, Your Highness?”  


“Ben,” says the Princess.  


“Sweet Ben.” The kitchen woman pats the tiny back, and he snuffles, and closes his eyes. He is asleep in moments.  


“I’m sorry,” the Princess says, suddenly flustered. “I haven’t asked your name.”  


“Arlah,” says the kitchen woman. “Just Arlah, my lady.”  


“Do you have children of your own?” The Princess is staring in exhausted bewilderment at her child, quiet against the kitchen woman’s shoulder.  


“Once,” she says. “But he is gone, and now they’re all my children, in a way, Your Highness.”  


She tucks a lock of ginger hair behind her ear.  


“You needn’t worry, my lady,” she says. “Your sweet Ben will be all right now.”

\---

The Princess stays on Arkanis for four standard weeks.  


Tiny Ben, the fussy princeling, spends most of his time on Arlah’s shoulder. She ties him to her and wears him as she goes about her work - he is small, smaller than he should be, as if he cannot thrive. Arlah doesn’t know why. Surely his mother must be enough reason for him to be properly fed, even if the Princess can’t nurse him often. One doesn’t allow a princeling to starve.  


She thinks of another tiny child, not so long ago, and how he never did weigh quite what he should have, but she does for Ben what she did for him, for her baby. Ben sucks contentedly on a corner of toweling soaked in milk, much like her baby did. And when he is with her, he is content - surprisingly so, for a boy everyone had assured Arlah was difficult and fussy.  


He cries when she hands him back to the Princess, and the Princess looks tired all over again.  


“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” she admits to Arlah, as she bounces the baby awkwardly.  


“I’m sure it’s nothing, my lady,” Arlah says. But she thinks that perhaps the Princess wasn’t one of eight children, wasn’t used to babies - this is her first, after all, and although Arlah has only borne the one, she knew well enough how to do for babies by the time her own came.  


Nonetheless it is not a very great surprise when the Princess hands Ben back to her. “I have been wondering, Arlah,” she says. “He’s done well in your care - he’s putting on weight, he’s sleeping more. I know it’s archaic not to have a nanny droid, these days, and they’re so _good_ , but they could never settle him. This is your home, I know.” She twists a fold of her dress - Arlah thinks she does not know she is doing it. “And I would not lightly ask someone to leave their home behind. But…”  


Ben wraps his tiny fingers around Arlah’s thumb, and she thinks of the little redheaded boy with the unwieldy name given by his father, so he’d always have something of him - if she’d only known - if she’d only known. But she didn’t know. And she cannot help him now.  


Tears sting at her eyes, and Ben whimpers, face crumpling, as though he can feel it.  


“Hush,” she says, banishing the thought and thinking instead about how charmed she is by the Princess’ boy. And Ben calms again.  


She cannot help her baby. But she can help _this_ baby.  


“I will come,” she says.

\---

Ben is four, and rosy, and calls her Lahlah, and likes to take her hand and show her things.

One day he drags her to the table where he has left his datapad, the one with the shock-absorbent corners. It’s playing a holo, something aimed at children, which from the low resolution and the dated fashions, she thinks might have been recorded when she was Ben’s age. 

“Look, Lahlah,” he says. “Your baby.”

He points at a boy about his own age, with vibrant ginger hair.

It's not her baby. But for a long, cold moment she searches his face, in case it might be.

“Sweet Ben,” she says to the delighted boy, pointing at the holo and wriggling with excitement. “It’s so nice of you to show me that. He's not my baby - but he does look like my baby.”

And she wonders how he knows. She hasn't told him about her baby. Who is not a baby anymore, now, who is old enough to be in one of Brendol’s schools.

Ben squeezes her hand. “I know that. You showed me pictures,” he says. “In your dreams.”

Sometimes he says things like this, and she chalks some of it up to the accidental mysticism of four-year-olds. Her boy used to tell her about the talking nerf that visited him at night, after all. But she wonders, still. Ben seems to know things he shouldn't. 

“I talk to him,” Ben says confidently. “When I sleep, Lahlah.”

She kneels on the floor and gathers him into a cuddle; he squirms happily, wiggles his hands free and gives her a kiss. And she doesn't think about her boy. Not with Ben giggling in her ear and saying, “Lahlah, you love me!” as though it were the best secret in the world.

\---

Ben is six now. He giggles less, though she can still coax it from him sometimes. Leia has told them both that soon it will be time for Ben to go to school, and Arlah has done her best to squash her mental images of the Academy on Arkanis, because wherever they send Ben, it won't be there, and he doesn't need to know about it. 

Arlah has pieced a few things together in six years of raising Ben, of seeing his mother and father exchange looks over the top of his head. They do not know what to do with their child. They never have.

Ben knows. Ben has always known far too much, far more than he should have been able to. It worries his parents. They argue, and Han is gone more the more they argue, and Leia works longer hours, and Ben wavers between clinging on to Arlah as he used to, and shutting himself away in his room alone.

Arlah knows that soon she will be back in the kitchens, and that worries her more than anything else. 

Ben isn't ready. He still has bad dreams - maybe more often than he used to, and they seem worse, lately. He tells Arlah not to sit with him, but she does sometimes anyhow. 

He is still so small.

(Her boy will be eleven now.)

She is chasing after him through the house, as Ben crows, an increasingly rare childish moment. She calls out to him, “Not in there, darling, mama's working -” but he charges through the door and into Leia’s office. 

“Come out, baby,” Arlah says, six or seven steps behind him. 

He is standing in the middle of the room with his hands pressed to his head and his eyes squeezed shut. “ _Mama_ ,” he says through his teeth, “ _stop._ ”

Leia has her head in her hands, and her eyes are wet when she looks up, but she reaches for Ben and tries to smile. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she says.

Ben lowers his hands slowly, and then bursts into tears.

Arlah doesn’t know whether to go to him or to let him go to Leia, but Leia solves it by standing up from behind her desk and pulling him to her. He clings and sobs.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she says, and pets his hair until he calms down a little.

“Arlah,” she says. “I… think there's something you need to see. Tonight. Not now.”

“ _It’s her baby,_ ” Ben wails, into the hem of her shirt. “You have to show her, Mama. She misses him. You _have_ to show her.”

Leia’s eyes are too sad, too old for her face. 

Arlah nods.

Ben buries his face in Leia’s hip. And Leia reaches out to tap her holoprojector on. 

The projection flickers to life, and Arlah feels herself tense, her lip curling. It's Brendol. Older, heavier, greyer, and still just as arrogant - none of the charm he’d been famous for, anymore.

He's talking about his Stormtroopers. He's always talking about his Stormtroopers. 

“ _... and the training program for the children of officers is progressing, producing first-class candidates. Here we see the 11-year-old class, practicing hand-to-hand._ ”

The camera feed cuts to rows of children, facing off against each other, hands at the ready. They run at each other and half of them fall upon the other half.

In the fourth row, a redheaded boy, lanky and coltish, snarls as he claws at his sparring partner.

The camera must be on a drone; it hovers over them, capturing for a few frames of close-up the face of the redhead -

\- the face of her son.

It’s him.

Arlah makes a noise in the back of her throat, half growl and half scream.

_Her baby._

And then her baby bends close and bites his partner’s ear, hard, comes up with red teeth and lips, and smiles.

Leia kills the projection.

Arlah loses a few seconds of time; comes back to herself on her knees, with Ben crowding into her lap, still sobbing, but now sobbing her name.

She hugs him, pulls him to her chest and rocks him the way she used to, the way he has been too big to do for some time now. And the kitchen woman locks eyes with the Princess, in that moment only two mothers.

“He’s gone,” Arlah says. “My baby is _gone_. There’s only - only _Armitage_ now.”

“No,” Leia says. “He’s just a child. You could find him. I know where this was shot.” She stares into Arlah’s heart, it feels like - the way Ben does before he says something too profound for a child. “You could find him.”

“I am needed here,” Arlah says weakly.

“Ben will be in school soon,” Leia says. “Go. You have been - invaluable, Arlah, I can’t tell you how much I owe you. But I have my baby. Go find yours.”

“Lahlah,” Ben quavers, against her shoulder. “He’s angry, he’s lonely. I love you. But I’m big now. He doesn’t think anyone loves him anymore. He needs you more.”

Arlah curls herself around Ben.

He is not her baby. She has helped him, and maybe he is old enough now - maybe his schooling will help with the dreams, maybe his mother can spare a little more time -

Her baby has no-one.

\---

It is some months later when a woman with raggedy dark hair disembarks from the passenger shuttle. She looks to be a refugee, and she wouldn’t be the first; there is just enough First Order presence here for some people to feel it boasts stability.

“Name?” says the dockside processing officer, as he looks over her papers.

“Lahlah,” she says. “Just Lahlah.”

“Occupation?”

She looks down at the deckplates. Her baby is here somewhere. She will find him.

“Cook," she says, feeling the past echo against the present. "I’m a cook.”


End file.
